Dementia mittens

I have always known how to knit, but never really knitted much in life. As a small child, I used to watch my grandmother unravel huge skeins of wool into more manageable balls. My grandmother was a good knitter - I suppose they were in those days as they made a lot of  their own clothes or made do. She taught me to knit basic things.  At school we had to knit squares in our break times to make into blankets for the homeless shelter near our school. In my twenties and thirties I knitted the occasional baby clothes for friends or family, but didn't really consider myself a pro.

A few months before the covid pandemic started in 2020, a Swiss friend of my Brighton friend visited her, while I was also there, and told us of her husband's dementia and his restlessness. The conversation developed into ways of maybe calming him, as he was quite agitated. The topic of dementia mittens came up. They are like knitted mittens in bright colours and decorated with things like ribbons and buttons for the person to fiddle with. I was asked if I might be able to make one for her. I researched what they looked like online and even found a pattern to work to, so I set to and knitted my very first one which I then sent on to the friend in Switzerland in early 2020.

Once the covid pandemic struck, I was housebound during the lockdowns on my own. Life was very boring apart from the occasional walk around the block. Kay had moved out and was was placed at the expense of the NHS in the Holiday Inn at Gatwick (see here) close to the hospital where she worked so as not to pass any hospital covid germs on to me as she was working in Intensive Care with dying Covid patients and I was classed as "vulnerable". So, in my newly acquired loneliness, I started knitting more dementia mittens. I ordered the wool and ribbons and other decorations online and would sit watching TV, knitting away. It helped me feel less guilty about watching too much TV.   It would take about a week to knit one just in the evenings and then decorate it. To start with I would hand them over to local care homes or charity shops and before I knew it I had a production line going!

In recent years I have made them for the foodbank charity shop, where I volunteer, and they have been flying off the shelves with requests from customers for more. To date I must have knitted well over 400 of them. Here are pictures of some of them for you to get an idea of what they look like. You can insert your hands inside the muffs and there are ribbons and buttons inside too to fiddle with.  I have been told that hospitalised dementia patients use them too to avoid fiddling with catheters on their hands or arms and pulling them out. Ouch!

some recent ones

Some of the many accumulating during the covid lockdown